Little Shop of Horrors – Old Joint Stock Pub & Theatre, Birmingham

Little Shop of Horrors continues at the Old Joint Stock Pub & Theatre, Birmingham until 26 September 2021.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

This sizzling production of Little Shop of Horrors is an in-house staging by Birmingham’s Old Joint Stock, which doubles as a pub – with a revered history as a bank – and now also a theatre.

If this punchy show is a measure of what this exciting venue – both a receiving house and originator of its own productions – can carry off, the set-up is clearly on a high. The evening is riveting, funny and pretty zany.

It stars a bright, impish, polished cast in a vivid treatment of Howard Ashman’s book and lyrics. The acting is top-top, the cast sings brilliantly. Alan Menken’s retro music, some of it consciously corny, is treated to solo and ensemble work as good as you’ll find anywhere.

Matt Bond gobbles up the main comic role as the twee little plant which metamorphoses into a snake-mouthed, man-eating monster. Bond mixes a sneering high falsetto with a booming, cackling deep bass; much better than baddies in Christmas pantos. Hissing, provocative, alluring, obscene, outrageously camp, we are mesmerised by this malevolent ‘horror’.

His plant’s costume – glaring green with smatterings of many colours – is equalled by the splendid (uncredited) attire of the girls: innocent (but superb) heroine Audrey (Bella Bowen) in exquisite polka-dotted pinks; black and white trouser suits for the three manoeuvring acolytes, an interfering chorus who brazenly burst into life whenever they dare.

This Mozart-like trio three, Ronnette, Crystal and Chiffon (Hannah Victoria, Tabitha Rose, Rebecca Withers), dazzle from the very opening, centred on Chiffon’s impressive mezzo), and as solos too. It’s thanks to Pippa Lacey’s dramatic, pioneering choreography. No less striking is director Adam Lacey’s adroit, inventive use of a small space; no wastage; just running perfection.

The hero, or antihero, is Seymour, employee of a gruff, rather hapless shop owner (Thomas Cove, hefty, upright and demanding), who suggests a window plant might grace the emporium and attract customers. Alex Wadham makes of Seymour a hapless, put-upon, classic nerdish weed (no pun), whose antics evolve around taming – unsuccessfully – this fast-expanding, gigantic plant, aching for the girl and fending off nasty boyfriends and intruders (Bradley Walwyn, Ben Hutt; more might perhaps have been made of them, in both script and staging).

It’s a delicious shambles of a yarn, but Seymour’s and everyone else’s solo numbers shine without exception. The (upstairs, hence invisible) sextet’s accompaniment (led by audibly versatile Jack Hopkins and his number 2, Ian Stephenson) – flute, sax, brass, keyboard, bass – gives the whole show marvellous zip. An uplifting stage occasion, at highlights it verges on genius.

Roderic Dunnett